Solar Gable Home by Illinois Team

With only the engineering and net metering contests remaining, the Solar Decathlon entry for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is now slightly ahead of other contenders, including Team California and Team Germany. It’s a tight competition, though. Solar Decathlon director Richard King yesterday said Team Germany may just receive approximately 25 more points that the next closest team in the net metering contest. Such a point spread could propel the same to its second straight victory. Nevertheless, Illinois has this beautiful home built with reclaimed materials that can produce up to four times its energy needs at times.

The Illinois team includes over 200 people who set out to prove that a traditional looking home, in this case a home with a gable roof line, can be built with modern technologies. Illinois used reclaimed wood from a barn and materials from a silo. They also used a Lamboo product, laminated bamboo, to frame the house with minimal thickness to reduce thermal bridging.

On the roof, there’s a 9.1 kW array of 40 solar panels tilted to a 45 degree angle. The panels and two inverters cost about $44,000.

The Gable Home is anticipating Passive House certification — it uses 90% less energy than a home of typical construction. The energy efficient home has low energy consuming appliances, triple-paned windows, and LED lighting. It also has water-efficient fixtures and a slew of products from CB2. Learn more about the home at:

I like that its simple, A open platform to changes< it will be interesting to see how it will wear over time. Im interested in the laminated bamboo, first time I have heard about anything like this for framing,which is a interesting substitution , but then again I know really nothing about other framing materials because I have only worked with wood(not laminated) and steel.Over all the look of the building < the architecture is interesting ( molding old and new) and the interior and exterior design is also interesting. Hope they do well